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The Quest for Noah’s Flood

National Geographic Video, 1 hr., $19.95

To order, call 1–800-627–5162 or go to nationalgeographic.com

There’s nothing like a sexy Biblical connection to heighten interest in an otherwise unrelated subject.

The Quest for Noah’s Flood tells two stories in one: The search by underwater explorer Robert Ballard (the man who found the Titanic) for ancient ships in the depths of the Black Sea and his hunt for signs of human habitation in that sea’s shallow waters. It’s the latter that raises the Biblical connection. Two respected geologists, William Ryan and Walter Pitman, have suggested that the Black Sea was once much smaller than it is today. About 7,000 years ago, they theorize, waters from a swollen Mediterranean broke through the narrow straits of the Bosporus and flooded the shores of the Black Sea.^a This massive flood, they further suggest, was remembered by the people who escaped the devastation and was retold through the generations in the neighboring lands to which they had fled, and was later preserved in the Mesopotamian flood stories and in the Biblical account of Noah’s flood.

The video begins with the first search. It follows Ballard during the summer of 2000 as he sets out to test an idea proposed a quarter century earlier by oceanographer Willard Bascom. The top 500 feet of the Black Sea, Bascom noted, consists of brackish water that supports teeming marine life; below that, though, is a 7,000-foot-deep layer of heavier saltwater poisoned by hydrogen sulfide. No wood-devouring life forms can survive in this lower layer, making it a perfect environment for the preservation of ancient ships. Ballard had never found an intact ancient ship, only cargo that was preserved because it was made of clay.

Before he could test theory number one, Ballard could not resist checking on theory number two. While still in shallow waters, he conducted underwater sonar scans not far from the shoreline. Sure enough, one scan picked up something unusual. Ballard’s team lowered Argus, a remote-controlled, camera-equipped submarine. Argus soon sent back views of pieces of wood that might be part of a collapsed building and right-angled stone blocks. The team also took core samples of the lakebed; analysis showed that about 7,600 years ago saltwater suddenly entered what had been a freshwater lake. Ryan and Pitman were vindicated.

Ballard also found the remains of a shipwreck nearby, but as with all the other ancient wrecks he had discovered, only the cargo had survived. The wreck whetted his appetite, however, to search the Black Sea’s lifeless depths to find “the perfect ship,” the fully preserved vessel hypothesized by Bascom. But all that awaited Ballard was a watery moonscape that reminded him of the Badlands of North Dakota. Previous commitments then required Ballard to return to the States, but his team stayed on. One more discovery lay in the deep: an intact 1,500-year-old vessel, so well preserved that a rope or piece of leather tied to the top of the mast could still be seen. Now it was Bascom’s turn to be vindicated. But Ballard was unable to tell him the good news—two 057days before the discovery, Bascom died.

Proving two very different theories in one expedition is no little feat. But does Ballard’s discovery of human habitation on the ancient Black Sea shoreline prove the accuracy of the Biblical account of Noah’s flood? Surely not. Did that flood inspire the story? Pure speculation.

For many believers, the Black Sea flood, however dramatic, will be no substitute for a worldwide cataclysm in which God destroyed almost his whole creation in order to start afresh. But theology aside, The Quest for Noah’s Flood gives a fascinating glimpse into the workings of modern-day marine exploration and of today’s best-known seafarer.

The Problem of Unpublished Excavations

Sophocles Hadjisavvas and Vassos Karageorghis, eds.

(Nicosia, Cyprus: Cyprus Department of Antiquities and the Anastasios G. Leventis Foundation, 2000), 108 pp. (paperback). To order, contact the Leventis’ Foundation, P.O. Box 22543, Nicosia, Cyprus

In 1996, the Biblical Archaeology Society (BAS) published a small volume of papers delivered at a 1994 conference it convened to address the problem of unpublished excavations.^b This was followed by a second volume on the same topic—papers delivered at a session convened by BAS at the national meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature.^c These two conferences and the papers published from them spawned a third conference, this one held in Cyprus under the auspices of the Cyprus antiquities department and the Leventis Foundation. The papers delivered there, the discussion of these papers and the resolution adopted by the conference form the book under review.^d

The Cyprus conference differed from the previous two in that, instead of focusing on various aspects of the publication problem, presenters addressed the problem only as it existed in their own countries—Israel, Greece, Italy and of course Cyprus. Unfortunately, political considerations prevented Turkey and the Arab countries from participating (Fawzi Zayadine of Jordan did speak at the conference, but he did not submit his paper for publication; thus, the situation in Jordan is not covered in the published papers.)

Failure to publish the results of an excavation is the equivalent of illicit looting, said Perez de Cuellar, then-Secretary General of the United Nations, in a 1995 report. As Robert Merrillees, head of the Cyprus American Archaeological Research Institute, pithily put it at the Cyprus conference, “If excavation is destruction, then non-publication of excavations is annihilation.”

In some respects, the problem is the same from country to country. It is “acute” in the entire Mediterranean region, to use the assessment of the situation by Sophocles Hadjisavvas, the current director of antiquities of Cyprus, and Vassos Karageorghis, the head of the Anastasios G. Leventis Foundation in Cyprus. In Italy, although the publication problem is “very urgent,” it is “very difficult [even] to draw up an index of the excavations awaiting publication. The number of excavations which have come to a halt, have been forgotten, or are temporarily discontinued is so high that I think it will be quite impossible to enumerate them and to plan a project of re-adoption,” said Maria Rosaria Belgiorno of the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche in Rome.

Israel’s Amihai Mazar called it “a worldwide professional disease.” In the case of the Late Bronze Age material from Beth-Shean in Israel, for example, it is just being published—60 years after the excavation ended.

The size of the problem is reflected, for instance, in rescue excavations conducted in Israel: Of more than 1,350 rescue excavations, mostly in connection with new construction, conducted from 1990 through 1996, only about 450 have been published. In 1996, Israel instituted a program, called the “Past Debt Project,” aimed at reducing this backlog by 15 percent each year. Uzi Dahari, who headed the program and explained it at the conference, met with laggard excavators to create a program for the publication of old excavations. In other cases, publication of the final report was assigned to someone other than the excavator. The program was supported by an annual governmental budget of $700,000. A monetary bonus, modern baksheesh, was awarded for meeting scheduled publication dates, the amount of which was determined by the size of the excavation and the complexity of the report. In 1997, the backlog was reduced in this way by 120 excavations.

Sometimes, however, nothing is successful. Mazar tells of a case in which the excavator died after digging for 30 years without publishing a final report. His widow refused to release his records, threatening to burn them if anyone came to take them. At that point, the authorities simply gave up. The lesson: Copies of all notebooks and other excavation documents should be provided annually to the antiquities department.

Karageorghis tells of a similar case in Cyprus involving a living archaeologist, Michael Katzev, who excavated the Kyrenia shipwreck, which produced, in the words of James Muhly, director of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, an “extremely important body of material.” Katzev has in his home the only copy of the excavation records. He will not publish a final report and there is no way to put pressure on him, said Muhly. Katzev is a man of independent means, has no academic position and cannot be denied an excavation permit because he has no interest in ever excavating again.

More common is a kind of self-induced excavator paralysis, which Karageorghis described thusly: “What is more difficult, to my mind, and often insurmountable, is the will and determination of the archaeologist to get rid of his fears, complexes and insecurities and sit down to ‘sweat’ on a chair, to spend hours, months or years in the library or office, to write up his reports, to ‘pay’ for all the joys which he enjoyed during years of excavations.”

Nevertheless, it does appear that some significant progress is being made. For example, Mazar reports that “the Israel Exploration Society, the Israel Antiquities Authority and the institutes of archaeology of the various universities in Israel have made great efforts in recent years to overcome the publication problem … There is a dynamic of ongoing publication activity.” Cyprus, too, has made great progress. The same is true, to a greater or lesser extent, in other countries, as well. Perhaps the most effective prod, in the words of Mazar, is “creating a socio-professional atmosphere that will stigmatize excavators who do not publish their results within a reasonable amount of time.” With this book—and, I hope, with this review—that atmosphere is being created.

The Quest for Noah’s Flood

National Geographic Video, 1 hr., $19.95

To order, call 1–800-627–5162 or go to nationalgeographic.com